9 key questions about the

longest government shutdown

in history, answered
What are federal employees rights? Does this happen in other
countries? And other frequently asked questions.
It costs money to run the government, and it’s Congress’s job to manage
the purse strings.

With the government now in the midst of its third shutdown under President
Donald Trump’s leadership — the longest in US history — there’s no
sugarcoating it: One of the legislative branch’s most basic functions has
broken down.

Congress has let funding for federal agencies lapse again because the
president is demanding funding for a southern border wall, a pet project
that doesn’t have enough support in Congress to pass.

Hundreds of thousands of federal employees are going unpaid. Basic

government functions, like maintaining national parks or inspecting the
national food supply for disease, have been halted or dramatically reduced.
Funding for key safety nets, like food aid, will run out in a couple of months.
1) What is a government shutdown?

Under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to periodically pass bills that

approve spending for the federal government. In practice, those spending
bills can last a few weeks or months or a whole year; they can fund the full
government or just parts of it.

Whenever the current spending bill expires, lawmakers must pass a new
one to keep the government running. Usually they do, but occasionally they
don’t: 20 times in the past 40 or so years, the government has shut down,
though most of those happened in the 1970s and ’80s.

Anyway, without an approved spending plan, the federal government starts

to shut down.

The government agencies that lack approved funding suspend their

operations. The agencies close up, they stop providing services, and their
workers are either furloughed or forced to work without pay — which leads
to a lot of them calling off work.

Now, the entire government never shuts down — major programs like the
military, Medicare, and Social Security are considered mandatory spending
and they keep chugging along even if there is an impasse in Congress. But
the rest of the government depends on these periodic spending bills to
continue operating.

2) How did the shutdown happen this time?

On December 21, 2018, Congress let funding for roughly 25 percent of the
federal government expire. By the midnight deadline, the House and
Senate still had not passed a spending bill appropriating money to nine
federal agencies, and the government partially shut down — as it remains
today.

Government shutdowns are usually the result of a stalemate in Congress.

But this partial shutdown has almost nothing to do with policy
disagreements in the halls of the Capitol building — and everything to do
with President Trump.

The impasse comes down to Trump’s demand for $5 billion to start building
a wall at the southern border, something Democrats refuse to support.
Trump has asked for wall funding since he took office, but every time
Congress came around to negotiating spending bills, Republicans
conceded the wall in exchange for funding other priorities.

In the weeks leading up to the December 21 deadline, it looked like

Republicans and Democrats would do the same. The Senate passed a
spending bill that fully funded the government but didn’t touch the border
wall (instead, it included $1.3 billion for border security more generally),
which had enough support to pass in the then-Republican-controlled
House. But Trump said he would veto that bill, so the House, then led by
Speaker Paul Ryan, passed a spending bill with $5.7 billion in wall funding
with only Republican votes, which the Senate would never be able to pass,
upending negotiations and leaving the government to shut down.

Since then, the new Democratic House majority has passed the 2018
Senate bill to reopen the government that doesn’t include funding for the
wall, but the new Senate, which is still controlled by Republicans and is
heeding Trump’s demands, won’t take up that bill again.

Congress is stuck. Democrats say they won’t negotiate a wall or border

security until Trump reopens the government. Trump isn’t backing down,
even threatening to declare a national emergency and re-appropriate
military funding for the border by fiat (he put that idea on hold). And
Republicans are sitting idle.

Welcome to the longest government shutdown in US history.

3) What government programs are affected by this shutdown, and when?

A wide swath of the government is already feeling the pain of the shutdown
in myriad ways: Aid to farmers affected by the Trump administration’s tariffs
is facing delays, reviews for IPOs and mergers are being put on hold, and
immigration cases could get postponed for years. Key services that have
been affected include staffing at national parks — which have remained
open but are getting trashed, and Environmental Protection Agency
inspections of places like oil refineries and power plants, which have been
put on pause.

Nine out of 15 federal departments and a number of agencies are affected

by this shutdown, including the EPA, the IRS, and the departments of
State, Housing and Urban Development, Treasury, Agriculture, Commerce,
Interior, Justice, and Homeland Security. Congress has fully funded the
military (aside from the US Coast Guard) and the departments of Veterans
Affairs, Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services.
Each affected department, and the agencies within them, have their own
contingency plans on how to handle the shutdown. They deem which
employees are “essential” — and have to work without pay — and “non-
essential,” which means they can be furloughed (or sent home without
pay).

At DHS, for example, the majority of workers, including Border Patrol,

remain on the job, while most workers at the IRS and the EPA have been
sent home without pay.

If the shutdown keeps going, these effects are only expected to get more
dire.

The USDA has said that food stamps will be funded through February, but
it’s unclear if the agency will have the funds to keep the program going
beyond that point. There have also been concerns that the IRS could
struggle with this year’s tax season, the first to implement Republican tax
reforms, even though the Trump administration has said that refunds will
still be processed in a timely manner.

Not everything stops operating during a government shutdown. The

military, air traffic control, federal prisons, and Social Security, Medicare,
and Medicaid are set to keep on running.

4) So who’s to blame for this shutdown?

Most government shutdowns result in endless blame games. But in this

case, Trump has actually gone on the record claiming responsibility. In a
meeting with the Democratic leaders ahead of the spending deadline, he
said he would be happy to shut down the government in a bid to force
lawmakers to fund his southern border wall.

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security,” Trump told
Democratic leaders a little more than a week before the latest shutdown
started.

In December, at the last minute, the president pulled his support for a
spending plan that had already passed the Senate, precipitating the
shutdown. The American public accordingly blames him for the
impasse far more than they blame Democrats in Congress.

As a general rule, if you are the one demanding a policy change in

exchange for funding the government, rather than agreeing to keep the
government open while you try to get what you want on the policy, you are
responsible for shutting down the government. Today, that’s Trump. He
wants the border wall in exchange for opening the government.

Republican leaders could pass a spending bill anyway, even in the face of
Trump’s veto threat. Democrats believe there are the votes to pass a bill
reopening the government and even to override Trump’s veto if necessary.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has refused to move a
spending bill that doesn’t have Trump’s endorsement.

The better question might be whether it matters who’s responsible.

Republicans in Congress shut down the government in 2013 in a futile
attempt to stop Obamacare, and voters punished them in 2014 by ...
handing them a shiny new Senate majority. Democrats shut down the
government for a few days in early 2018 over the Deferred Action for
Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the price they had to pay was...
winning a House majority in the midterms.

There simply isn’t much evidence that voters hold grudges about
shutdowns; they might see it as a general sign of dysfunction in
Washington, but it’s not their top issue when they go to the polls.

Then again, this is now our longest government shutdown in history. We’re
in uncharted territory.

5) How long can a government shutdown last?

The government reopens when Congress passes a spending bill to fund

the government and Trump signs it into law. It can go on indefinitely.
(Trump has even quipped that this could last months or even “years.”)

It’s unlikely that it would go on that long, in large part because shutdowns
have real effects on people’s lives and the political pressure will eventually
overcome lawmakers. It is worth noting, however, that come September 30,
2019 — the end of this fiscal year — the spending bills for the parts of the
government that are currently funded will expire.

For now, the government is still partially shut down because of two
disagreements.

One is a longstanding policy fight over border security, and the other is a
negotiation over when to reopen the government. The impasse ultimately
comes down to a difference in priorities. Trump wants a border wall before
he will reopen the government; Democrats want Trump to reopen the
government before they talk border security.
There are three ways this can end:

1. Trump caves, agreeing to reopen the government without funding the border wall.
2. Democrats cave, agreeing to some — or all — of the border wall funding Trump wants
and vote for a spending bill.
3. Republicans cave and band together with Democrats, pass a spending bill with a veto-
proof majority to fund the government without Trump’s approval.

It’s important to remember that government spending fights, like most

bipartisan negotiations, are about political parties exercising their leverage.
It’s a game of chicken, where both parties are on a collision course that
ends in a painful government shutdown. In the end, someone has to give
in.

6) What about all the federal employees and contractors who aren’t getting paid?
What are their rights?

As of this past Friday, roughly 800,000 federal employees have missed

their first paycheck. About 380,000 employees have been furloughed and
another 420,000 are currently working without pay. Congress has already
passed a billthat guarantees all federal employees back pay once the
shutdown is over, but that does little to help them while it drags into its
fourth week.

What’s more, thousands of federal contractors are potentially affected by

the shutdown as well. As many as 500,000 contractors are affiliated with
the agencies that are caught up in the shutdown, according to NYU
professor Paul Light. Many of these contractors won’t receive any back pay
at all, while others might not see any impact on their paychecks, depending
on how their employers have negotiated their contracts.

Interestingly, federal employees can’t use strikes to protest the current

situation. Because of the Taft-Hartley Act, which was passed in 1947, it is
actually illegal for federal employees to strike, and many unions have urged
their members to refrain from doing so. As Quartz points out, the impetus
for the law was to deter federal employees from disrupting key government
services by striking to attain better wages. It probably didn’t consider that
workers would strike because they weren’t being paid for their services at
all, the Atlantic notes.

Workers who don’t go into the office because they are participating in a
strike could be considered “absent without leave,” the American Federation
of Government Employees’ policy director Jacque Simon told the Atlantic.
As a result, they could face penalties at work including, potentially, losing
their jobs.
They do have some recourse, however.

The American Federation of Government Employees has filed a class-

action lawsuit against the Trump administration, noting that it’s illegal to
keep workers on the job without compensation. It won a similar challenge
after the shutdown in 2013, ultimately guaranteeing workers who
participated in the suit twice the back pay they were owed.

7) How many times has the government shut down in the past?

The government has shut down 21 times since 1976, the same year the
modern budgeting process for the federal government went into effect.
Since then, only one president — George W. Bush — has made it all the
way through his term with no shutdowns.

Shutdowns started occurring frequently under President Jimmy Carter; five

shutdowns happened while he was president. Under Carter, government
agencies operated on a shoestring budget during shutdowns but didn’t
actually cease to function until after 1980, when then-Attorney General
Benjamin Civiletti issued legal opinions finding that in order for the federal
government to not violate the 1884 Antideficiency Act, agencies truly had to
shut down.

The most government shutdowns under any one president happened

during the term of President Ronald Reagan. There were eight shutdowns
under his tenure, but they were relatively short, lasting one to three days.
Until Trump’s most recent shutdown, the record-holder for longest
shutdown was the second shutdown under President Bill Clinton, which
lasted for 21 days when Clinton and congressional Republicans couldn’t
agree on a spending bill.

And Trump has had three shutdowns on his watch so far: a shutdown
in January 2018 over immigration and spending, an extremely short
government shutdown in February 2018 after Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) got
mad about government budget caps, and the current 24-days-and-counting
shutdown ... which, again, is over immigration.

8) Do other developed countries have government shutdowns?

Government shutdowns are uniquely American. When the government

shuts down in the US, the people who often feel the pain are government
workers going without paychecks or those who depend on affected federal
programs like food stamps. In other developed countries like Australia,
politicians are the ones who feel the brunt of a shutdown. For instance, the
Australian parliament risks being dissolved if government isn’t funded,
which, in theory, makes it less likely to happen.

“We cannot find another democracy that shuts itself down,” House Majority
Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters this week. Referencing parliament
dissolving itself in Australia, Hoyer quipped that it “would not be a bad
alternative.”

Other developed nations also have a lower threshold for passing budgets
— a budget typically needs a simple majority rather than the higher
percentage required in the US Senate. Simple majorities help prevent this
kind of gridlock, but they could also carry the risks of making budgets more
partisan documents, since you need fewer people to pass them.

There aren’t a lot of situations comparable to the current government

shutdown in Europe and other developed nations; Northern Ireland came
close to the government shutting down late last year, before Great Britain
intervened (Northern Ireland is part of the UK). But many other
governments are designed to not hamstring government operations if the
legislature fails to appropriate money.

9) This is now the third time the government has shut down in one year. Why does
this keep happening?

It’s not unusual for government spending fights to go down to the wire. The
budget and appropriations process is a difficult bipartisan exercise that
requires Democrats and Republicans to make serious concessions on the
policy priorities. (And Congress is really good at procrastinating, leaving
very little time to smooth over last-minute issues.)

Congress’s failure to keep this process going three times in one year paints
a very clear picture of the current political landscape.

The first shutdown under Trump happened in January 2018 because of the
White House’s immigration agenda; progressive activists urged Democratic
lawmakers to use their leverage in the spending fight to get assurances
that Congress would protect the undocumented immigrants thrown into
legal limbo after the Trump administration attempted to sunset DACA.

The second shutdown came a month later, in February 2018. Rand Paul
was angry over a deal negotiated by congressional leaders that busted
government budget caps in place since 2013. He held up the voting
process in the final hours and left funding to lapse just overnight, to send a
political message about government spending.

The current shutdown — which Trump has been threatening for months —
is over the border wall, a campaign promise Trump made in 2016 as part of
a fearmongering anti-immigration agenda.

Throughout history, government shutdowns have highlighted periods of

intense division in policy, whether over debt management in the 1990s or
funding the Affordable Care Act in 2013. But it’s important to note that the
political calculus of a government shutdown has shifted over time.
Shutdowns were once seen as a complete disaster. Now they’ve become
part of political strategy.